Abuse by Children Services

Please contact me if you know of any groups or forums who deal with issues relating to the Children Services in the UK. You can leave a comment on this blog or contact me via email.

I have a problem with the Children Services. Basically they have been pursuing us just because we are a convenient target. If I thought for one moment that they wanted to actually help us I would put up with a lot of crap. But it is clear that their focus of attention is on finding things wrong that they can blame me (the parent) for so that they can enact some kind of action which benefits them because it is keeping them in work and does nothing or worse for my daughter. As someone once put it to me "They are keeping their job not doing their job."

I am not of the opinion that the Children Services is a wholly bad thing. I think that it is possible they do a lot of good work. I will say that I have little experience of that side of their activities. But I am of the opinion that a lot of what they do is not good. I guess it is rather like the army. You might think that it is a good thing to have an army to defend you from bad people. But when the society dictates that you think certain things and you can't say other things and they start to enforce their control with the army it becomes clear that the army is acting in a bad way.

To keep things in perspective I want to make the point that a person or an organisation might do a lot of good things but when they do something bad that is bad. I too often come across the argument that something bad is forgivable because things would be worse otherwise.  I call this the Uncle Adolf Syndrome. I have fallen for this argument too often in my life. It is not acceptable. Bad stuff is bad stuff and it needs to be addressed. So if someone's intention is good then they will be responsible enough to acknowledge what they do wrong and try to address it to make things better in the future. Failing that one is left with the view that things would be worse if the bad stuff wasn't happening which is patently wrong. If the intention is good then the intention is to make things better not to maintain a status quo which is engaged in bad stuff.

So... The Children Services, when they do bad stuff, should recognise it and do something about it. But, so far, in my experience, they don't. What they do do is to try to defend themselves by distraction, avoidance and blame. It is understandable because we live in a blame culture. The idea being that if, for example, the Children Services can be seen to be doing something seriously wrong then "heads must roll" is the response. We don't seem to be able to get past the vindictive, punitive attitude. Actually if something is wrong then recognising it, accepting that people are not perfect and taking action to put things right is all that is needed. But that is not how our culture works.  Rather it indulges in a mechanism of cascading oppression.

There is a long history to my difficulties with the Children Services but I will just mention the latest round of rubbish and abuse. It all started when my daughter was rushed into hospital. I am a single parent and she is my only child. I am male and she is female. The NHS acted appallingly. From the general service which was shoddy and third world in nature, to the behaviour of some of the nurses which was cruel, the whole affair was terrifying for my daughter. But the nurses (and one in particular) took an arrogant, prejudicial and authoritative stance and reported us to the Children Services. Maybe I will expand on the appalling experience in the hospital some other time but this is where the involvement with the Children Services started. There were allegations from the nurse of inappropriate touching, my daughter undressing in front of me and my lying on her bed. All of which were actually factually wrong. I am my daughters only parent and she was placed on an adult female ward and the officious ward sister didn't like me, a male, being there. She interpreted my kissing my daughter on the forehead before leaving as "inappropriate touching". She referred to my daughter lifting her t-shirt for the doctor to look at her tummy as "undressed in front of him" and the bit about lying on her bed was simply a fiction (not that there would have been anything wrong with it if I had).

So I understood the Children Services concerns when they rushed in the next day. I accepted that they wanted to interview us both. They interviewed us for about one and a half hours each. Even this I accepted as understandable. I even tolerated their insinuations, allusions and pseudo-psychoanalysis and explained that they were not correct. Then they produced what they call an "Initial Assessment". It was shocking. It did shock my daughter and not only did it cause her to cry a lot but it destabilised her and has caused her to stop going to college to try to catch up with her education which has been devastated by the education system and their unbelievable bullying.

At this stage I was unhappy with their approach and said that I had some serious concerns. They suggested I put them in writing so that we could discuss them. I did. To date they have entirely ignored that letter. Their conclusion in their Initial Assessment was that my daughter was a child in need as defined by the Children Act 1989 and concluded that her vulnerability was such that she was "unlikely to reach or maintain a satisfactory level of health or development without the provision of services". They decided that the action to be taken was to do a Core Report. I don't disagree with this conclusion and wouldn't disagree with the chosen action if it were benign. But they embarked on their "investigation" with prejudice. They had failed to complete the Initial Assessment in the designated time. They then explained the procedure for the Core Assessment which would consist of a sequence of meetings. They failed to attend meetings making up lies about not being able to find the bell (This is not an assumption by me, it has transpired that either that was a lie or some other fact they asserted was a lie, so one way or another they have lied to us). They did not complete the meetings as planned. When I objected to their changing meetings to avoid talking to me and to duplicate meetings with my daughter they reluctantly agreed they could have the meeting they specified with me and then simply didn't turn up.

At this point I complained in writing to the manager. The list of errors was immense and I suspect to any observer these complaints would be self evidently correct and reasonable. I think they were troubled by this letter because I never heard a dickybird out of them for three months. So I wrote to them expressing my concern at their lack of response to my letter. It took them some time but they wrote back acknowledging one minor prejudice that wasn't even theirs (namely that the nurse had prejudicially stated that the child was "into witchcraft") and totally dismissed everything else. It was a token letter so that they couldn't be accused again of not responding. So I wrote to them again pointing out that they had a legal responsibility to complete the Core Report and either they had not done that or they had completed it without the designated meetings in which case it was invalid and they were keeping it in secret on their Integrated Computer Service (ICS) for all and sundry to look at. They responded by sending me a copy of the faked Core Report. It is faked because it has wrong dates, wrong information, and has clearly been completed since they received my complaint three months after they state it was completed. And to add to their errors they sent it to me in their haste to cover their proverbial behind. They specifically gave the Initial Assessment to my daughter explaining that it was confidential and it was hers and I could not read it unless she specifically gave me permission. Well that idea of confidentiality flew out the window pretty easily when they were afraid of what I had stated they had done.

Now some people might think that if I had shut them up in the first place that I had a achieved my pragmatic objective of stopping their assault on us and I might leave it at that. But I have a bigger problem. We are very nearly destitute. There is a massive debt, no house, no pension, no earned income and my health is in a seriously bad way. My daughter's life has been devastated. She effectively stopped education after 2 years at secondary school and has spent the last three years in bed in an attic. That's it! I cannot easily explain here how bad things are but in the next year if things don't change significantly I cannot imagine how bad they will be. Seven years ago my wife and my daughter and myself lived in a nice cottage and we were solvent. For whatever reason my ex-wife decided to embark on a massive assault. She constructed a bizarre scenario of me being an aggressive, alcoholic, sexual and violent abuser. I suspect this has more to do with her childhood than the current reality but that is another issue. What happened was that the courts were involved, the Social Services were involved, the Police Child Protection unit were involved, CAFCASS were involved, and the whole thing became a complete nightmare. I hope to explain it all some other time but the effects on my daughter and me have been dreadful. Now each and every single detrimental event could easily have been survived had all other things been equal. And this is my point; It is the accumulation of bad stuff that in the end becomes overwhelming and does irreparable and significant damage. So exactly when should one object? For example my ex lies to the police about me, says I have hit her and bashes her own nose to cause it to bleed to convince the police. They arrest me and treat me badly and on investigating they realise there is no case to answer and they unceremoniously dump me on the streets eight miles from home in the middle of the night with no suitable clothes or money. I got a taxi to take me on the promise of paying him when I got home. So how do I deal with that? How do I get, the expenses, a day's pay, and compensation for the distress? How can the balance be corrected? The fact is that one simply has to put up with it. The number of problems and the distress and the damage over the course of several years was relentless and not survivable. The CAFCASS investigation put us under a lot of strain and although they concluded the daughter should live with me we still suffered because of the accusations and the threats. The Social Services were "very pleased to report that there was definitely nothing wrong" but when I pointed out what was going on and that they had concluded there was nothing wrong with me or my daughter but there was something evidently wrong with the mother because all this trouble was evidence of it they simply omitted that consideration from the report. The solicitor dealing with the family issues was exceptionally good and we won a case that no solicitor expected us to win but the solicitor looking after the financial matters was a disgrace to the legal profession. The barrister that took home well over a thousand pounds for half a day's work advised me incorrectly and the final settlement was simply not survivable. Due to unbelievable prejudice in our culture the parent and child were thrown out of the house whilst the very rich parent was left with almost everything (including my pension). If I were female I believe things would have been very different and my daughter's life would not have been devastated.

The story is so rich in our societies crap I will have to write it up elsewhere but for here the point is that I have had enough. I cannot continue to expend energy defending myself from other people's assaults. It is not enough that they have stopped hurting us and get away scot-free whilst we sit here licking our wounds with the situation having got tangibly worse again. And for their part they have benefited at our expense because they are filling their designated hours with "justified" work. So they get a house and a pension and holidays whilst we don't. All because they came and did us unacceptable harm.

The Children Services are paid to prevent abuse and to help make things better for those who are abused or deprived. It is the Children Services who have abused us and caused us harm. Now I hold them responsible and I want compensation. Admittedly the effects may not have been so bad had their actions been the only assault on us. But that is no excuse. If you hit someone with a brick and they die you are held responsible for murder. It is no argument to say that they might not have died if they had been stronger.

The Children Services are guilty of abuse and if anyone knows of any support groups or organisations I could contact I would love to know. I need help and I want help and I will get satisfaction from this one way or another. You could always send lots of money but just a web address, a contact or a little money would do.

Either leave a comment below or contact me via email - thank you.

For the benefit of the search engines: sexual abuse, violence, alcoholism, justice, Children Services, UK, not so Great Briton, Social Services, injustice, prejudice, lies, insinuations, suggestions, allusions, compensation, help!